


angles of unfair advantage

by misandrywitch



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Spring Break, canon-typical alcohol use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-05-31 17:14:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6479131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Tequila or bust,” Kent says. He turns a little and smiles, right corner of his mouth, at Shitty. His teeth are very white and his eyes are a hard color to pin down but they’re picking up the shifting neon lights in the room.</p>
<p>Uh oh, Shitty thinks.  Oh, fuck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	angles of unfair advantage

**Author's Note:**

> for cait, as usual & more or less? & also dakota who wrote the original shittykent fic that ruined my life & haunts my dreams (please go read it if you haven't yet). 
> 
> this is set some time after jack signs??? in the spring??? idk when samwell's spring break takes place exactly & honestly i don't care. 
> 
> sleeping w shitty knight as a form of self actualization on the road to dramatic internal contemplation: something that jack zimmermann & kent parson have in common. that's the title of my body of work related to the hockey comic.

Sometimes, you can convince yourself a bad idea is in fact a very good one, when you’re curious enough about what the outcome might be. Shitty’s pretty good at that. Just crown him the King of Justifications.

It’s a whole other can of worms when the bad idea isn’t really even a bad idea at all, because that means the justification’s more about convincing yourself you maybe shouldn’t have done that, and guilt is something he’s always been less easy with. It makes him loud, uncomfortably overcompensatory with the desire to do something alleviate it.

Exhibit A: Shitty, eighteen years old, sitting in the back of the first gender studies class he'll take and realizing it's his solemn duty to make sure everyone he knows how important this shit is as an apology for, well, essentially everything that he is and was raised to be, quickly followed by Exhibit A (2), which is Lardo telling him loudly and in no uncertain terms that she's got it, thanks. 

Exhibit B: Shitty, sitting in someone else’s umade bed without any pants on, staring someone else’s gigantic fluffy cat in the eye as it looks at him skeptically, trying to summon the impetus to feel guilty about how he’d ended up here at all and failing.

The cat is very skeptical about the whole thing. It’s that kind of cat.

“Your judgment is not wanted,” Shitty tells it, sternly. It just climbs into his lap.

 

-

 

What happens is this: Spring break. Family shit. Tequila shots. Gay bar. Familiar face. Hot tub. Hookup. Cat in his lap.

It’s a great story. And one he can never tell another single living breathing soul. Except for Lardo Duan, of course, who doesn’t count, because honestly it’s her fault.

 

-

 

An all-costs-covered trip to the city maybe most notorious for questionable booze-soaked decisions in the entire country should, in theory, be a wet dream of a spring break. Should be, as Shitty had repeatedly had to remind all his friends who mostly seemed upset that he wasn’t taking them all with him. Vegas should be the kind of place Shitty would be delighted to wreak a great deal of havoc in. Should be. Would be, if he was going there voluntarily or with any company that he enjoyed even a little bit. Even going by himself would be better than the circumstances surrounding the very last spring break excursion of his undergraduate career.

Even, Shitty thinks morosely, going with Jack Zimmermann, who would probably insist that they wake up at 5am to go jogging and drag Shitty to all the incomprehensibly boring museums that Nevada has to offer, would be better than this.

“An hour,” cousin Gloria is saying emphatically. She’s currently invading the hotel bedroom Shitty is sharing with her brother Chris, who is maybe Shitty’s second least favorite cousin because of his tendency to get blackout drunk and pass out in bathrooms.

“I need to take a whiz,” Shitty says matter-of-factly, hoping it’ll make her decide to leave the room. Gloria is, naturally, unfazed. She’s perched on the corner of Chris’s uncomfortable squishy hotel queen wearing a fluffy terry cloth bathrobe and holding a curling iron. Their families—Gloria and Chris’s parents and Shitty’s dad and Uncle Milo and his wife—are all down at the hotel bar, and Chris vanished a few hours ago with Milo’s stepdaughter Lucy to wander the strip, which means Shitty is stuck with Gloria, who has plans.

“Go on, then,” she says, waving her hand in the direction of the bathroom, and Shitty sighs. “I’m gonna use your outlet in here!” she calls as he stomps off to the bathroom. “And we only have to go for an hour—and nobody else is gonna go with me—“

“You’re asking me because I go to Samwell, right?” Shitty calls.

“No,”  Gloria says, but her answer sounds less than certain. She’s looking at herself—long brown hair and freckles—in the mirror when Shitty comes out of the bathroom. “I’m asking you because you’re the most—“

“The most what, cuz? Gimme your wine cooler.”

“Openminded,” Gloria says. She passes the glass. It’s shitty and Shitty is pretty sure she jacked it from the cabinet in her hotel room, but he drinks it anyway. He thinks longingly of tub juice. He thinks longingly about what the rest of the team is probably doing right now. Getting shitfaced and played COD, most likely. Eating Bitty’s homemade cooking. Gazing in awe at Jack Zimmermann’s grumpy assets. He’s been in Vegas for three days and they’ve been, maybe, the three longest days of the year.

“Uh huh.” He hops up on the counter next to Gloria, who snatches the glass back.

“And fun?”

“You’re saying an hour but it’s gonna be longer than an hour,” Shitty says. “And yknow I live in a highly coveted room in the Haus so I’m very good at knowing when people are trying to butter me up.”

“People want to live in that room? Really?” She wrinkles her nose in the mirror.

“Yes! I’m chugging your wine cooler for that. Anyway, I’m giving it to Lardo.”

“And not in the way you want.”

“Thanks, Gloria, really. I definitely want to go with you to a sketchy as fuck gay club you read about in the internet now that you’ve insulted my love life. Especially now that I know it’s not because I go to Samwell.”

“No, it’s because I know you hooked up with your father’s intern last summer.”

“Potato, potahto,” Shitty says. “And that’s only the first intern you know about.”

“Gross.” Gloria expertly twirls a lock of hair around the barrel of the curling iron, then shakes it free a minute later. “Okay, fine. Let me put it to you this way. What else are you going to do tonight?”

Shitty has no idea, but taking a prissy soon-to-be-med-student whose interests revolve around Gucci, alcohol and diagnosing other people’s skin conditions as something serious to a gay bar is not really high on his list. “Hot tub,” he says. “Wine cooler?” And then death, he adds in his head.

“You’re a square,” Gloria says, and that rankles. It really does. “Coming with me beats having to hang out with your father.”

She grins at herself in the mirror because she’s got him, and she knows it.

“Fuck you,” Shitty says finally. “Fine. You’re buying me booze, though.”

Gloria punches the air with one hand, because the other’s holding her curling iron.

 

-

 

They drink the rest of the cheap wine in their minibar in the time it takes Gloria to get ready and Shitty to throw on a pair of cutoffs and a tanktop, and they get lost for twenty minutes trying to find the damn place but when they do, Shitty is legitimately delighted. It’s pretty small and playing a stream of shitty electronic dance music, and there are heady neon lights that keep shifting color, red to gold to blue-green. It’s crowded but not packed, and Shitty follows Gloria up to the bar.

“Fireball,” she grins over her shoulder.

“Go big or go home,” Shitty says, and shows the bartender his driver’s license and then lets Gloria shove a shot glass into his hand. “Cheers,” he says.

“Spring break!” She hollers, and they knock their drinks back together. “Okay,” she says, pink-faced. “Hold my bag?”

“Fuck--” Shitty starts, but Gloria shoves her Louis Vuitton at him, winks, and then turns to wind her way towards the dance floor. “Legit” Shitty calls at her back, then slides his ass onto the nearest available bar stool and digs his phone out of his shorts.

Ransom has sent him about twenty snaps of Bitty singing while perched on the kitchen counter, and Shitty flips through them, missing them all so bad it feels physical even though it’s only been a few days. Jack’s response to his desperation at being dragged out is bordering on smug, and Lardo’s is earnest but distracted. He sends a half-hearted text off to his mother then sets his phone down.

“Spring break blows,” he tells the bartender, who just nods sympathetically. Shitty watches him walk off down the bar, collect a few glasses and pour someone a Jack and Coke. And then he pauses in front of a young man in grey plaid and cracks a smile.

“The usual, yeah?” The bartender asks.

“You know what I like,” the guy-- blonde hair under a backwards hat-- says lightly, and Shitty blinks, blinks again, and then almost drops his phone on the floor trying to get it back into his hand.

 

-

 

_GUESS WHO IS IN THIS BAR W ME RN AT THIS MOMENT_

 

_your mom_

_the pope_

_gillian anderson but if that’s true then dibs_

 

_KANT PURSON_

_FUCK_

_KENT PARSON_

 

_oh shit_

_wait really? what the fuck are the odds there are so many bars in vegas_

_wait hold on_

 

_GAAAAAYYYY BAR LARDS_

 

_shitty_

_u cant do anything stupid_

 

_o ye of so little faith_

 

_or_

_you have to do the stupidest thing in the entire world_

 

_WHAT you think I should FIGHT HIM_

 

_??????_

_what no i think u should buy him a drink_

 

_-_

 

In his defense, you only get to spend the last spring break of your undergraduate college career in Vegas once, and if he isn’t going to seize an opportunity like this by the horns when it appears then what kind of man is he? Not one worthy of being recorded forever in the annals of history, that’s for fucking sure.

Foolhardy men who don’t make idiotic decisions because their best friends dare them to seldom make history.

 

-

 

What Shitty does is this: he check to be sure Gloria is out of sight and occupied, he smooths his hair out of his face, and he slides down the bar right as Kent Parson is turning away from the bartender and towards the room with his drink in his hand.

They make eye contact and there’s a definite moment of recognition on Kent Parson’s face, followed by a moment of sheer panic, and Shitty has the sudden, swift thought that this isn’t a good idea at all. Kent’s face sits there in a moment of shock, someone who clearly didn’t think he would be and did not want to be recognized, who’s here to avoid it happening because of a whole lot of other things. Shitty had just been going to say _Oh hey, Parson, how’s it going,_ something that could be, conceivably, the kind of thing you say to someone you know that you see in a bar. But that isn’t going to fly. At all. Which means Shitty’s going to have to commit to the ridiculous and really ride it out, for better or for worse.

He leans one elbow on the bar and props his chin on his fist and grins and raises his eyebrows as high as they can go.

“Hi,” he grins. Kent Parson stares at him in bewilderment. “Haven’t seen you here before. You come here often?”

The corner of Kent’s mouth twitches, maybe. “Sometimes,” he says.

“See, cause I don’t. Like, at all. Good vibe, though. Good music. Live on the other side of the country, actually. I’m a lawyer,” Shitty adds, helpfully.

“The cutoffs gave you away.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a competitive underwater basket weaver.”

“Wow,” Shitty says. “That sounds intense. You any good?”

“I’m alright,” Kent says seriously.

“Sure that’s impressive to watch.”

“I’m kinda camera shy. It’s gotta be in private or I balk.”

“Fucking sucks, man. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Have a drink.” Kent raises his glass, which is mostly ice at this point, and Shitty’s grin cracks.

“Oh cmon, man!” He barks. “Way to kill the vibe. You’re supposed to play along!”

“To what? Whatever the hell that was? And I thought you were a poli sci major or some shit.”

“Technicalities,” Shitty shrugs. “I did get into Harvard Law, if that counts for anything, which it doesn’t.”

“So you can--” Kent smiles properly for the first time, turning around on the barstool to put his elbow on the sticky counter, “pahk your cahr? In the yahd?”

“Eat shit,” Shitty says. “Fucking New Yorkers.” Kent’s grin spreads. “Shitheads. All of you. I’m rescinding that drink offer. ”

“You asked for it,” Kent says. “For-- whatever the hell that was.”

“I was going for subtle!”

“Sure, like a sledgehammer.”

“It’s an acquired taste,” Shitty says, and Kent laughs, turning around towards the bar again. He slides his empty glass across the countertop and gets the bartender’s attention by raising his eyebrows.

“What do you want?” He asks over his shoulder. “The same again, thanks,” he says to the bartender, who takes his glass.

Shitty considers it, thinks about the day of the week, the ridiculous music in this bar, this silly situation. “Gimme an AMF,” he says.

“What the fuck is that?” Kent picks up his drink which looks suspiciously like Malibu and fruit juice.

“It’s spring break, brah,” Shitty says triumphantly. The drink is luridly blue and he grins at it before sticking the straw in his mouth.

“It looks like Koolade. With tequila in it?”

Shitty doesn’t dignify that with a response, just rotates in his seat to look around the room for his cousin, who he spots because of the glitter on her dress. She’s off in one corner, Jack and coke in her hand, talking to a group of girls Shitty hadn’t noticed before. He tries for a second to catch her eye and fails, so gives up, deciding instead to pull out his phone and update Lardo. He texts her _p sure he bought me a drink,_ just to see her reaction.

_pretty sure?_ She responds, and Shitty shakes his head as he puts his phone back in the pocket of his cutoffs.

“What the hell are you even doing here?” Kent asks a second later, and Shitty turns around.

“Spring break, brah!”

“I understand the concept, yeah. But you’re, you know, not wandering the strip with a crowd of drunken co-eds drinking out of some festive souvenir cup, which is usually what I’d expect from the spring break crowd.”

“I’ve already been dragged to Paris Las Vegas, don’t you worry,” Shitty says. “I’ve got material for, like, six Eiffel tower shaped bongs. And I’m, uh-- well-- not on vacay with friends. This is the world’s most unfortunately family outing.”

“Oh my god, really?”

“Someone’s extremely misinformed idea of what would be a good time. I think my grandmother wanted to meet Britney Spears.”

“Hey,” Kent says. “Don’t knock Britney, man.”  

“Wouldn’t dream of it. As for this place-- well-- see the brunette chick in the corner who looks like she’s gonna throw out a hip doing those gyrations?”

“Yes.”

“My cousin. She dragged me here, fuck if I know why. I think she aiming to be more cultured, or find the one straight guy in the room. Or she’s out to have her first gay experience, which I can concede is a worthy goal for a spring break.”

“Think she’ll succeed?”

“No idea. It’d give her dad an aneurism. Would be nice to not have to carry the whole family’s bisexual burden, though. What about you? Doing here, I mean? Figure you, yknow, hang out in swankier places these days.”

“I like this place,” Kent says, a little defensively. “I don’t tend to get recognized.” Shitty  winces.

“Yeah,” he says swiftly. “Can imagine that’s a bitch and a half. In my defense, okay, it was Lardo’s idea.”

“Lardo’s the killer pong player, right?”

“The one who wiped the floor with you?”

“Yes, thanks, tell her I say hey.” _he says hello he remembers that u whooped his ass @ pONG,_ Shitty types out meticulously. The drink’s starting to kick in. “It’s no big deal anyway,” Kent keeps talking. “I was meeting someone here but I think I got stood up, and now I don’t look like that dick sitting alone at the bar.”

“You say to the dick sitting alone at the bar,” Shitty says automatically. He’s put two and two together, of course he has, and Kent is looking at him in a way that suggests he knows Shitty has come to the correct conclusion about who he was probably meeting here and what that implies. There are a lot of things Shitty could say and some he’s had practice at so he knows they go over well, but he decides to say none of them. It seems like the best thing to do in the moment, which feels somehow strange and a little awkward and earnest, all at the same time.

“What does the V stand for?” Shitty asks instead, and Kent snorts into his Malibu pineapple.

“Why the fuck are you asking that?”

“Because people always say it,” Shitty shrugs. “And, yknow, initial in the name, everyone always wants to know what it stands for. I can guess, if you like? Victory. Virgil. Vladimir.”

“It’s Vernon,” Kent says. “Some great grandparent’s name, I think. There’s a reason I stick with the V.”

“Very stodgy, Harry Potter’s uncle.”

“What’s the B stand for then? That’s what it is, right?”

“What?” Shitty says. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”

Kent’s lip twitches.

“Guess,” Shitty grins around the rim of his glass.

“What? No. Brad.”

“Fuck no.”

“Bruce?”

“Do I look like a Bruce?”

“Uhh, Brandon.”

“Low hanging fruit, Parson. Cmon.”

“Benjamin. Is it gonna say Benjamin on your diploma?”

“Absolutely not,” Shitty shoves ice out of the way with his straw and drains the rest of his drink. “Though now that you mention it that would be pretty fucking funny. I probably could legally change my name in two months, right?”

“How’s that feel?

“What? The big G? Fucking weird, man, I don’t know.” Shitty’s drink is gone, which is a disappointment. He wants another one. “I’ve spent like two fucking years complaining about how long it took and now that I’m at the end, right, playoffs over, thesis done, I could use another two years. Well, that’s a fucking lie, and I am stoked. I am! But you get used to things being how they are, yknow? The people you hang out with and the place you live and the shit you get up to. My drink is gone. Your drink is gone.”

“What do you wanna drink next? Not another one of whatever the fuck that was.” Kent turns back towards the bar and takes Shitty’s glass as he goes. Their fingers touch. “College sounds fucked,” Kent says, leaning his elbows on the bar counter.

“Brah.”

“You gonna keep playing hockey?”

“Might,” Shitty says, because he really doesn’t know. He hasn’t thought about it all that much to be honest because the idea makes his chest ache. “Might decide to be the best fucking player on some local beer league. That’s one good thing about graduation-- I’m never gonna run again. Never. Never gonna let anybody drag me out of bed at 5 a.m. to jog ever again as long as I live, don’t care how scary they are.” He laughs, then cuts himself off even though there isn’t any way Kent can know he’s thinking about Jack. Except, of course, that Jack is Jack. “You want shots?”

“Tequila or bust,” Kent says. He turns a little and smiles, right corner of his mouth, at Shitty. His teeth are very white and his eyes are a hard color to pin down but they’re picking up the shifting neon lights in the room.

Uh oh, Shitty thinks.  Oh, fuck.

 

-

 

They do shots. Somewhere after they do shots Gloria hauls Shitty out of his seat to dance for a while, which he does with all the bad taste and enthusiasm he has. It has the right effect, which is embarrassment, and after about ten minutes of trying to apologize for his rendition of the shopping cart she hauls him back off the dance floor and towards the bar.

“You’re unbearable,” she snaps, tossing her hair out of her face.

“You need to change up the parties you go to, Glor,” Shitty says. Kent, still sitting at the bar, is watching them argue with a grin on his face and Shitty raises his eyebrows and then sticks out his tongue in his direction. “Don’t you have a hernia from taking everything so seriously all the time?”

“You don’t even know what a hernia is,” Gloria says sourly. “Give me my bag.”

“People appreciate my moves,” Shitty hands it over, and glances over at Kent who is still apparently having the time of his life listening to Gloria spout off.

“I like your moves,” he says. “That windmill action? It’s gonna catch on.”

“Who is that?” When Gloria gets angry her eyebrows collide, and they’re bumper to bumper now. It’s the Knight family cranky face, or something. Shitty gets it too. “Whatever,” she continues. “Don’t get snippy at me. Not my fault you’re here instead of doing nothing all week long with that girl you won’t ask out.”

“I’m never telling you anything personal ever again as long as I live,” Shitty sighs, and Kent snorts.

“You didn’t tell me anything! I guessed. It was pretty obvious, you know, you stopped bringing your hot friend to family dinner parties and started bringing Larissa.”

“I’ve got a lot of hot friends, man,”  Shitty says, just to be difficult.

“You know, the one I like. The Canadian one.”

“Several of them are also Canadian. Big country.”

Gloria looks at him archly from under her eyebrows. “The one with the butt,” she says, and Shitty inhales so fast that he chokes for a solid minute.

“I don’t think you’re his type,” Kent says, deadpan, and Gloria turns her pretty impressive glower in his direction.

“Who the hell are you--” she starts.

“Hey,” Kent talks over her, “what’s his name?” He jerks one thumb in Shitty’s direction.

“Bye, Gloria,” Shitty says quickly and turns her around so she’s pointing in the direction of the dance floor. She shoots one last glare over her shoulder at him as she walks off. He leans back against the bar and starts giggling because he can’t help himself. Leave it to Gloria, of course, to circumvent any kind of delicacy or context to hone in on the one thing Shitty’s trying to not think about discussing. Shitty’s not sure if he should apologize, or run, or just buy more drinks.

“She’s-- something--” Kent says slowly, shaking his head. He looks a little shellshocked, though Shitty couldn’t begin to guess from what.

“You’ll be shocked to hear she’s my favorite cousin.”

“I think you need another drink then,” Kent says.

“No, no,” Shitty catches his wrist before he turns the rest of the way around and Kent raises his eyebrows and when he turns back Shitty can feel the delicate bones in his wrist shift under the skin. “I’ll get this round.” Kent starts to protest and Shitty shakes his arm around so Kent’s hand flops back and forth for a second. “Apology tequila,” Shitty emphasizes his point with another shake, and Kent’s staring at him bemusedly. “For the brick that Gloria just shitted. The elephant in the room.”

“The elephant.”

“The Canadian one,” Shitty says helpfully. “With the butt.”

Kent stares at him for a second, eyebrows turning down, Shitty’s fingers still wrapped around his wrist. “Bentley?” He asks solemnly.

Shitty shakes his head. “Tequila.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, and takes his wrist back.  

-

_duuuuuuuuuude_

_dued. dude._

 

_omg shits chillax ur codependant ass_

_have sangria will travel_

_bits & i are getting swastey _

_hows it going are you getting gay married in vegas yet_

 

_WICKED might be in love???? starin him in the face just thinkin abt how he plays hockey_

_dont tell jack that_

_who can say did shots think im hittin on him hard 2 tell_

_all v ambiguous_

_?????????_

 

_wait really_

 

_idk maybe i hit my head_

_ & all this is an illusion _

_the whole universe_

_were all just the terrifying nightmare of some primordial beast_

 

_shitty hit on kent parson_

 

_u didnt let me finish i was gonna tell u abt the primordial beast_

_wait really_

 

_tell him about ur primordial beast_

_dont tell him that_

_im serious shits he seems like the kinda guy who could benefit from being hit on by u_

 

_u have THE WORST IDEAS_

 

_i dare u_

_shitty_

 

_FUCK!!!!!_

 

_-_

 

“Sorry,” Shitty says when he surfaces from his phone again. It had taken a long time for him to type the word ‘primordial.’ “Making sure nobody burns my Haus down while I’m gone. So you were really stood up?”

“Apparently,” Kent makes a face. “Unless I missed him while I was watching your bad dance moves. It’s whatever, it’s not like it’s anyone I know or care about.”

“Can’t imagine anybody would wanna blow off, yknow,” Shitty makes a vague hand movement towards Kent’s biceps. “You.”

“Well my face and my occupation aren’t plastered all over my Tinder profile, are they?”

“But your abs are? Because that’s what I meant. I’ve seen your Men’s Health cover image, man.” Shitty neglects to mention that Ransom and Holster had it hung on the wall in the attic under the guise of ‘getting ripped goals,’ because that’s not something you just bring up in casual conversation.

“Right,” Kent says, and smiles some. He smiles with just the corner of his mouth when he’s not being serious, or that’s Shitty best guess. “Easy to forget you can find pictures of my stomach on the internet.”

“I’m sure it’s just as impressive in person,” Shitty says somewhat shamelessly.

“You are?” The corner of Kent’s mouth creeps up another inch.

“Brah,” Shitty says, as the bartender passes them their shots, two limes and a salt shaker. "Very." He licks his left hand so the grains of salt stick, then positions the lime between his middle finger and thumb. Kent does the same thing, and it could be Shitty's imagination or mere coincidence that he looks up and meets his eye right when he's licking his hand at the spot where his thumb meets his forefinger, but somehow Shitty doesn't think so. His face feels very warm all of a sudden. 

"Do you have a toast?" Kent asks, eyebrows up. 

Shitty has thousands of toasts, mostly very bad. Comes from playing a lot of drinking games. He considers it for a second. "Here's to Hell," he says stoically, raising his glass. "May my stay there be as much fun as my way there." And he licks the salt from his hand, tosses back the shot, and shoves the lime in his mouth. Tequila and tart lime juice flood his tongue in quick succession, a satisfying chain reaction. 

"Amen," Kent says, discarding his slice of lime into his shot glass and setting the glass on the counter. He takes Shitty's glass out of his hand and holds it out until Shitty drops his own lime into it. "Oh, hey." He reaches out suddenly and crosses the space between their two stools and their bodies with one hand before Shitty can really figure out what he's doing. "You missed some." 

There's some salt left clinging onto Shitty's hand that he didn't get, and he watches kind of dazedly as Kent traps it with his forefinger. Rather than flicking it off onto the floor or something he puts the tip of his finger in his mouth, which makes a voice in Shitty's head that sounds a little too much like Eric Bittle scream  _unsanitary_ for half a second before the rest of his brain tells it to shut the fuck up. 

"Thanks," he says, brilliantly, wonderful and witty move Knight. Well played. He knows this is on purpose because is not only looking him in the eye but he's also smirking. 

"No problem," Kent says. 

This has, Shitty decides, transformed from something ridiculous and amusing to a near-crisis four alarm situation. “Be right back,” he manages, and he hops off the bar stool and high tails it to the bathroom without looking behind him, barrels into a stall and slams the door shut. And then he texts Lardo.

It comes out as unintelligible gibberish (his hands seem to be about six times bigger than usual) so he gives in and just hits the dial button on his phone and presses it to his ear.

“Oh my god shut up,” Lardo says when she picks up. “Sorry bro, not you,-- knock it off! Yeah, it’s Shitty.” There’s a great deal of shouting in the background that vanishes quickly so he assumes she’s walked outside onto the porch or up the stairs. “The frogs are playing Mario Kart,” Lardo says, her voice muzzy and soft like it gets when she’s drunk and in a good mood. “What the fuck do you want? Where are you?”

“Bathroom,” Shitty says. “Having a crisis? Vegas is a horrible place Lards.”

“So you’re saying it worked?” There’s the sound of a door closing. “I’m utilizing your bedroom, bee tee dubs.”

“Don’t puke in my bed please,” Shitty says and bounces the heel of one sneaker against the metal stall door. “And maybe? I thought it was a joke but it’s not a fucking joke, Lards. Not a fucking joke. I’m considering kicking down the wall in the bathroom to make an escape or, like, making out with him in a corner of this bar. Is that weird? It’s weird.”

“Kinda weird,” Lardo says. “Also kinda badass. Are you sure he’s--”

“Yeah,” Shitty says. “As sure as the sun or whatever old people say about being sure.”

“Well are you gonna? Oh, you made your bed for once in your life. Comfy.”

“Don’t puke in my bed! I don’t know! Fuck, I’m going to hell.”

“This isn’t gonna change that,” Lardo says. “Maybe I’ll just crash here. Shits, it’s spring break.” The image of Lardo lying down on Shitty’s bed, feet probably dangling off the edge or hooked around the runs of the ladder that let you get up there in the first place, is not helping anything about this situation.

“It’s gonna cement my place. Give me a nice little throne, maybe. With a prong right in the center.”

“What else are you gonna do with yourself?”

“Break into the hotel pool at an inappropriate hour? Jerk off? Watch Pay-Per-View? My options are limitless, man.”

“Shits.”

“This makes me very nervous, Lardo.”

“Isn’t that what makes it fun?” He can hear her grin. He takes a deep breath. “If you wanna then you should. Go cement your throne and your title. I’ll keep it on the D-L if you pass on some deets. One deet, maybe.”

“Fuck,” Shitty runs his hands over his face and takes a deep breath. “You’re Satanic, yknow that? And-- what-- this isn’t-- you’re encouraging me to--”

“You’ve got my blessing,” Lardo says grandly. “Go forth and suck dick, Shits.”

“You’re the oral sex fairy, thanks,” Shitty says dryly. “But I don’t, I mean-- you-- and, uh, me--” He has no idea what he’s trying to ask, exactly, only that it’s important that he say it.

“You’re an ass,” Lardo says, which is fair enough. “Are you asking me if I mind? Cause I don’t. Are you gonna say anything about why you’re trying to ask me if I mind? Cause that’s a different question.”

“Both? I guess?”

“We can talk about it,” Lardo says. “I’m gonna fall asleep in your bed, there’s no way I’m getting down from here.”

“Don’t puke in it. Lards--”

“Shits,” Lardo says. “Hang up the phone.”

“Okay.”

“You’re an ass.”

“You like it.”

Lardo hangs up first, which is probably a win or something if he were thinking about it that way.

-

The hall leading from the bathrooms back to the bar is plastered in old colorful event posters and Shitty gets caught up looking at them so he doesn’t stop when he almost walks into Kent, who is coming down the hall from the other end.

“Fuck holy-- hi.” Shitty reels in the curses and also his elbows.

“Hi,” Kent says. “Thought for a second you left.”

“Nah,” Shitty says as casually as he can, which isn’t very. “Taking a leak. Yeah.” He assumes Kent is in the process of doing the same thing and will just continue down the hall to the bathroom, leaving Shitty to stew in his own decision-making for another minute, but he doesn’t.

Instead, Kent props one arm up against the side of the hallway wall, so Shitty can see the cords of muscle in his forearms stand out, and takes a step forward so his hips are at an angle between Shitty and the wall. Shitty could walk right past him if he wanted to, there’s plenty of space in the hallway and Kent’s body isn’t actually blocking his way forward at all, but there’s something about the line of his hips and how it creates a triangle of space between the two of them that feels intimate. Shitty doesn’t go anywhere. Kent cocks his head, his weight resting almost entirely on the arm bracing him against the wall, and Shitty can feel his eyes follow the line of his own hips which is, he has to admit, a good trick. Something in his frontal lobe snaps and sizzles like a live wire.

“Full disclosure, uh,” Shitty says, “can’t say this was entirely my end goal tonight. Not saying I’m not down to clown but uh—okay, it was kind of a whim. I guess. At first.”

“You’ll be shocked by this,” Kent says, “but I guessed that much.”

“Oh so you’re smart and pretty,” Shitty says, and Kent’s expression cracks into a smile.

“This isn’t the kind of place I usually run into people I know,” he says. “Which is the point. Especially—“

“Soon-to-be college grads from a school halfway across the country that you probably never thought you’d ever go back to again?”

“Yeah, that.” Kent shrugs. “Though the ‘stache is pretty recognizable, so I really couldn’t have missed you.”

“I’ve been told I’m a hard man to forget,” Shitty says. “Though mostly as an insult. Like a fungus.”

“I don’t know,” Kent says. “You did make an impression. You, and the tub juice. And your encyclopedic knowledge of Brazil’s criminal justice system.”

“Free knowledge!” Shitty says. The first time Kent Parson had showed up at the Haus he’d been 3 beers and 3 pages into a research paper and hadn’t been able to talk about much else. Occupational hazard, more or less. “So, uh, point is--”

“Point is I’m out of plans and you—“

“Had a questionable quantity of tequila and hit on you at the bar?”

“Was gonna say ‘vanished to the point where I thought you made an excuse and left’ but—“

“Not exactly.”

“I see that,” Kent says. “So?”

“So what?”

“So. I’ve got a hot tub and a shit ton of cheap champagne at my place. Unless, of course, you’re really keen on babysitting your cousin for the rest of the night.”

“Now you’re trying to bribe me.”

“You do keep saying ‘spring break,’ repeatedly, and granted I never went to college--” Kent grins, like the edge of a very sharp knife, his eyebrows half an inch higher than they should be, and Shitty feels a sort of manic intent unfurling in the pit of his stomach that replaces any kind of reservations he might have about this.

“Nah,” he says. “Your estimation of what spring break should be is as informed by vacuous media representations of co-ed life as mine is, so everything you mentioned sounds more or less on the mark.”

“Including you hitting on me?”

Shitty considers it. “Yeah,” he says.  

“Well alright,” Kent says through his smile. “Then let’s bounce.”

 

-

 

Shitty likes to think of himself (and he does like to think of himself, which is as much a character flaw as it is a sign of self-awareness if he’s going to be honest) as a tightly wound bundle of contradictions and conflicts that are the result of both nature and nurture in a way unique to the children of what pass for aristocrats in the U-S-of-A. It’s an amusing pastime, anyway. He likes to try and evaluate himself in contrast to other people, an intellectual exercise that’s almost as much about figuring other people out as it is about defining the space between himself and them. He’s gotten better at it as he’s gotten older, he thinks, even though some of the traits he picked up solely because he wanted to know their reactions to them are so ingrained in what he does that he can’t drop them now. The unruly joy of cursing, just to make somebody glare at you.

They hail an Uber outside the bar and Kent asks the driver to put on 90’s pop hits at the same time Shitty requests Def Leppard, but the Spice Girls wins out over just about anything. Shitty remembers to text his cousin that he’s leaving. Shitty also remembers to text Lardo fifteen question marks.

People are almost always a lot more than one-sentences dustjacket summaries, even the ones that are easy to write off. Something he’s still learning. Kent Parson should be easy to write off, but he isn’t, because Shitty knows how much it sucks to be playing the game where the only rules involve guarding parts of yourself, and Shitty remembers being seventeen years old and in love and how that had felt.

Shitty wonders how much of Kent Parson developed in opposition to Jack Zimmermann. Or in conjunction with, even. That’s a hard line to draw. Maybe an impossible one.

 

-

 

“Pretty slick digs,” Shitty says, because it’s true. Kent’s apartment is all modern lines and minimalism, which is offset a little bit by the giant jumble of expensive sneakers near the front door and also the obviously-handmade knitted blanket tossed carelessly over the couch. The couch looks like it’s got an IQ higher than Shitty’s, or at least more horsepower than his car. An expensive bachelor pad setup until you look at the photos on the fridge, which are all of Kent and a similarly blonde, pretty girl who is unquestionably a younger sister, grinning at the camera. And also the cat hair.

“It’s alright,” Kent says, kicking off his shoes in the doorway as Shitty looks around. Shitty cranes his head around to look at him, feeling ridiculous again, which naturally means he keeps on talking.

“Exactly the kind of place my cousins jerk off thinking about buying,” he says.

“Oh fuck off,” Kent laughs. He switches on the lights in the kitchen, pulls his wallet and keys out of his pocket and dumps them on the counter, glances down at a cat’s water dish as he goes. He pauses to fill up a glass from the sink and pour it into the dish, which strikes Shitty as a funny and domestic thing to do considering the situation.

“Seriously! Very trendy--”

“Says the guy who lives in a frat house.”

“—aaaaand that’s that, I’m heading home. Won’t stand in the living space of any man who insults my Haus, man. At least she’s got character.”

“A frat house with character, then? Appeased?”

“We’ll see. I really love the hole in my bedroom door, just so you know. There’s a dramatic story behind it and everything.”

“You want water? Booze?”

“Both,” Shitty says, and props his elbows up on one side of the kitchen island as Kent pulls another glass out of a cabinet. Shitty chugs it because he knows he’s going to regret it if he doesn’t. “You promised cheap champagne.”

“I meant it,” Kent says. “It’s all left over from some stupid party our rookies threw around new years. Don’t know why I got saddled with a case of it, but there you go.” He opens a pantry door and there is, indeed, a collection of pretty crappy bottles of champagne stacked on a shelf behind the world’s most gigantic tub of protein powder.

“Wicked,” Shitty says.

“So,” Kent says, as he struggles to slide his thumbnail underneath the foil surrounding the cork on the bottle. “Pining, huh? Your cousin says you’re pining.”

“Not the words she used,” Shitty says defensively. Kent peels foil from the top of the bottle, raises his eyebrows. “What, you wanna talk about this now?”

“Kinda. Stand back,” Kent says, and he pops the cork so it flies into the sink, then drinks straight out of the bottle. Then he hands it over. “So?”

Shitty scowls. “I’m being chirped by people who don’t even know Lardo. Fine, yeah, guess pining isn’t a completely inaccurate choice of words for my present situation. ‘Complicated,’ that’s another. ‘Graduating’ is a third one. ”

“That sucks,” Kent says. “She seems cool.”

“She is,” Shitty says, feeling like he’s two steps behind in this conversation. “Why’re you asking, brah? I’m, like, maybe five minutes and a little more champagne away from making out with you in your kitchen and you’re asking me about my hopeless crush on a chick who turned your flip cup game to ground beef.”

“I’m asking because I was thinking about making out with you in my kitchen in five minutes, and you have a hopeless crush,” Kent says. He takes a step closer and takes the bottle back. His eyes are bright and mischievous and Shitty has no idea where this is going.

“It’s spring break,” Shitty says. “And you’re hot. And, fuck it, yeah, I’m considering making a kind of questionable decision because I’m graduating in two months and have a hopeless crush on someone whose friendship I’m terrified of fucking up, but I also think it’ll be worth it, and if anything it’ll just be fun. Which is justification enough, yeah?”

“I’m not gonna sleep with you because you’re Jack’s best friend, for the record,” Kent says, and Shitty stops mid sentence to stare at him because it’s about the last thing he thought he’d say.

“You know how to keep a guy on his toes,” Shitty says slowly.

“I think I hit on you at the bar because you are, but I’m not gonna sleep with you because you are. Which is weird, for me.”

“Okay,” Shitty says, then pauses. “Wait, though. You saying you’re not gonna sleep with me or you saying your reasons for sleeping with me are not because I’m Jack’s best friend?”  

“Yeah,” Kent says. He’s really good at holding a lazy, almost bored, expression on his face that seems to read _I’m cool enough that I don’t need to really invest in this,_ but there’s something about the set of his mouth and the light in his eyes that suggests he might be having a hard time holding it steady right now. Shitty’s delighted by it. “I’m still gonna sleep with you.”

“Okay,” Shitty nods. “Got it. Glad we’ve had this heart to heart-- thing-- whatever this was? Group discussion? Air clear, we’re all on the same page. Unstoppable forces. Honor among thieves?”

“You’re planning to rob me?” 

“I’m metaphoring. And you’re waiting for me to shut up now, aren’t you.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, and takes another two steps forward so they’re face to face and less than half a foot apart, setting the bottle on the counter as he goes. Shitty’s heart is suddenly jackhammering up to eleven, a psychotic heavy metal percussionist on a murder spree, and he’s fighting the ridiculous and hysterical urge to laugh which is probably some kind of fucked fight or flight instinct trying to assert itself. Kent looks at him, heavy-lidded, takes another little step forward. He catches Shitty's chin with one hand, and then suddenly and unexpectedly snorts out laughter with such force that he wobbles sideways into the kitchen island, and because they're so close together he takes Shitty with him. Shitty stares at him as he clings haphazardly to the counter, one hand over his face. 

"I just--" Kent wheezes, "thieves, booty. Was that a line? It was a line, wasn't it?" And Shitty's own laughter busts out of his ribcage so loud that it's practically a shout. 

"No!" He cackles. "It was just-- I got nervous."

"I'm gonna plunder your treasure trove--" Kent starts and can't even finish his own thought because his laughter overtakes his words, and he clutches at Shitty's shoulder to stay upright. 

"Is that an X on the seat of your pants?" Shitty's voice wobbles dangerously. 

"I was trying to play it so cool--"

"And then you thought about booty?" 

 Kent wipes at his eyes and takes a deep breath a second later, looking up. His face is pink from laughter and his hair is mussed and the contrived, awkward stiltedness of their approach has evaporated, leaving behind it a kind of tequila-infused clarity. Shitty decides, just like that, that he's ready to stop fucking around, and so he does. 

He catches Kent's elbow to pull him upright the rest of the way and then steps forward to remove the rest of the gap between them, his fingers around Kent's elbow and Kent's hand still on his shoulder. They both lean in at the same time so their noses bump until they maneuver who goes where, a compelling slide of lips and teeth and the remnants of their laughter that's swallowed up when Shitty presses their mouths together more firmly. Kent's teeth are on his bottom lip, his hands in his hair, and Shitty catches him by the hips to press him back against the edge of the counter, almost knocking over the bottle that's still perched there, their knees tangled up between each others' and their breath short and fast. 

Kissing someone new is strange, and it's exciting, the adventurous tenuous uncertainty of how it will play out, the navigation of space that hasn't been shared before. Shitty's enthralled with it, alcohol and someone's hips under his hands and how Kent's breath hitches when he pulls back a little bit and then presses forward again.  

Shitty’s in the habit of falling in love without any warning or any pretense. Not always just with people—with places, ideas, books, concepts. The entire concept of growing something hairy and magnificent on his upper lip, for example. He was one-thousand percent in love with Bitty’s cooking the very first second he shoved a mouthful of pecan pie into his mouth, and he’s remained at least seventy-five percent head-over-heels for Bitty since then. He’d fallen in love—and then very swiftly out of it—with the general concept of academia, and the first time he’d seen the Haus he’d sworn, shitfaced and sincere, that he’d never love anything more.

Jack had been different because Jack had been a real asshole for a pretty good solid chunk of time, and Jack can still be a real asshole, and Jack will continue to be an asshole in the future, Shitty is sure, when they’re old and wrinkly and yelling at kids to get off their lawns together in their twilight years. Jack’s assholery is part of why Shitty loves him, now, even when it drives him up the wall and around the bend. But they hadn’t liked each other, not one bit, when they’d first met, and the fact that he felt first concerned about and then friendly towards Jack had crept up on him, and by the time he’d realized those things it was only natural to go the whole way.  

With Lardo it’s different too, because Shitty had been besotted with her for some reason, something about the turn of the corner of her mouth and how she’d hidden herself a little behind her long hair when she said something biting and funny. He’d begged her, on his knees and all, to become the team’s manager because he’d known somehow that’s how things had to be and he was tickled by the idea. She’d said yes, reluctantly at first and then firmly, and if Shitty had fallen hard and fast before, well--

But of course there’s a difference between the sense of general and theoretical amorousness and animosity towards someone, and the concrete, and Lardo had slipped so quickly and so well into his life and his friendship. The best thing ever to happen to him, or at least the top five. But by the time that had happened and Shitty had realized how fucked he was in regards to the whole situation, the task of finding a way to navigate from friends to who-knows-what had felt gargantuan. Still does, of course, because it’s not like he’s actually done anything about it yet and the prospect of doing so feels like being shoved off a cliff head first. Exciting, sure, but with the potential to end in death.

But that’s all what _might be,_ a lot of maybe’s and what if’s and possibilities, and it’s something that should conflict with what _is_ at this very moment but doesn’t.

Because what _is,_ at this very moment, is something else entirely, and Shitty has the chance to not drop off this cliff but he’s let that go and he can’t even bring himself to mind it. It’s spring break, and there are champagne bubbles in his blood, and if he’s at least halfway in love with Kent Parson right now, well, that’s just how it goes.

 

-

 

Kent almost trips backwards over the doorframe. Shitty knocks the hat off Kent’s head, and Kent laughs, which Shitty can feel against his jaw. He almost has the sense of seeing himself outside himself, one step back from the strange series of connections and decisions that put them both here even as he’s feeling someone else’s hands work on shoving his own shirt up and over his head.

Shitty likes to think that’s all it really takes, because isn’t it? Isn’t this all that really matters? A look, a touch, a chance encounter in a neon-lit room where you won’t think you’ll know anyone, the possibility of company when you think you’re going home alone, the ways in which people get into each others’ spaces against their own wills sometimes, or even just for fun. That’s all we’ve got.

 

-

 

Somewhere in between getting his own shirt off and actually walking through the doorway into Kent’s bedroom (they startle a very large fluffy ginger cat, who leaps off the bed and stalks out between their legs to places unknown), Shitty gets nervous, and so he comes up for air. Getting nervous when you’ve got your hands hooked through someone’s belt loops and their zipper undone is ridiculous, but he does anyway, maybe the signs of a fledgling preservation instinct that’s taken 21 years to rear its head.

“What’s wrong?” Kent asks, shifting a little so his back isn’t as trapped between the sharp edge of the door frame and Shitty’s body. Shitty can feel Kent’s pulse, the race of his heart, in the spot under his ribs, and also his own, which is somewhere up in the vicinity of his nasal passage. Kent’s eyes, a hard color to pin down, are sincere and curious, and the feeling takes off as quickly as it came.

“Nothing,” Shitty says, and he leans forward and drags his teeth over the line of Kent’s jaw, a day unshaven, and then steps back and turns around. “Double-checking this isn’t some kind of, dunno, motherfucking spring break fever dream that I’m having because I’m in a coma after having too many mimosas with my grandmother at breakfast. Yknow.”

“Don’t think so,” Kent says lightly. “Unless it’s your grandmother’s dream, because I’m in it too.”

“My grandmother’s nightmare.”

“You, uh,” Shitty can tell he’s trying to keep a straight face but isn’t doing a very good job, which is a funny thing to watch because he’s read Kent as someone with a pretty good poker face. “You usually have fever dreams about making out with hockey players?”

“I’m a terrible and weak man,” Shitty says, and the tiny annoying voice in the back of his head that tried, for a second, to raise a compelling argument against doing this dies a final screaming death.

“Who’s got my Men’s Health photoshoot in his bedroom.”

“Never said that. You coming or what?”

“Yeah,” Kent says, and he crosses the room and catches Shitty’s wrist with his hand, then Shitty’s shoulder, then Shitty’s chin, and his mouth on Shitty’s mouth is warm and certain.

 

-

 

It’s good. Much better than good, really, both of them breathless and and wild with it by the time they actually make it to bed, Kent’s mouth on his and their laughter somewhere in the space between them. When that dissolves its replaced by something tenuous and serious, almost soft, a strange emotional shift on the face of someone Shitty's still getting to know. He lets it all go where he's led, lets himself be pushed onto the bed and slides his hands up Kent's thighs and watches him and thinks a thousand things all at once, none of which he says out loud. Vulnerability is such a strange state, all in the eyes and the shoulders and the hands. 

  
  


-

 

“Well,” Shitty says later, leaning somewhat pathetically against one of the pillows on the bed, “I’m going to hell.”

“You left the booze in the other room,” Kent says, and rolls himself upright to put both his feet on the floor, running his hands through his hair. Hunched over Shitty can almost count the vertebrae in his spine and the muscles in his shoulders.

“I was considering, yknow, flinging it around the room in a decorative manner, but you do have to live here, so.”

Kent doesn’t strike Shitty as the truly cuddly type but he stands up with surprising abruptness. It’s mostly impressive considering Shitty probably couldn’t stand at this second if he tried. He’d just collapse onto the carpet, jellyfish-style.

“Worth it though, right?” The silence is awkward so Shitty picks up the thread of his previous thought. “I mean, the eternal damnation bit. Imagine going to hell for, like, tax fraud. Cooking the books. Thinking naughty things about your neighbor’s wife. It’s okay if you earn it, or at least justifiable. Look the Devil in the eye and say, yeah, I’m in hell, but it’s because I had some good sex, smoked a lot of pot, took the Lord’s name in vain. You high five, you’re bros, you play beer pong until the reckoning. I bet he’s fun. God’s a prick. My family’s way too Wall Street to be religious but I know that much.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Catholicism?” Kent hasn’t come back into the room so Shitty’s starting to think something’s up beyond some people’s post-coital standoffishness. “Balls,” he says, and hauls himself up and in the direction of the bathroom. His pants are nowhere in sight so he gives up on them and staggers towards the kitchen.

Kent is standing at his kitchen island with his hands on the countertop, frowning in the direction of the champagne bottle . Shitty blinks at him.

“You put your hat back on?” He says. “You don’t have any pants on.”

“It’s my vibe man,” Kent says. He sounds distracted.

“I’m gonna use your hot tub,” Shitty says firmly.

“What?”

“Hot tub. Gonna use it. Will I get arrested if I go outside with my wang out?”

“No, just-- you’re gonna break your neck. Did you just say the word _wang?_ ”

“Will not,” Shitty marches to the sliding glass door that leads out into the tiny patio area behind the townhouse. There is indeed a jacuzzi sitting with the cover pulled over it, and Shitty sets about yanking it off, which is unsuccessful until he realizes he’s pulling it from the wrong side. He manages to fling it off and steam billows up from the water, and it’s not enough to make his feet tingle when he climbs in. It’s the kind of unnecessary excessive thing you own when you’ve got a lot of money to blow and want to show it. The whole apartment feels that way a little bit, at least at first.

Making a space that’s yours is a weird process, and it’s sometimes harder to do it somewhere new once you’ve done it once already.

“What are you doing?” Kent is still in the kitchen and Shitty can’t really see him through the steam but he waves one arm in his direction.

“Every party has a pooper,” he warbles, an old singsong rhyme they used to repeat at Andover when someone didn’t want to condone their next bad idea.

“I’m coming out here because I’m worried you’re going to drown,” Kent says with a sigh, and he comes out of the kitchen, leaving the door open.

“Legit,” Shitty says, and Kent climbs into the jacuzzi anyway, taking his hat off.

They sit there in silence for a few minutes and Shitty closes his eyes. He’s not sure if the steam and the hot water is making him feel drunker or more sober, but his whole body feels loose and slow and he’s in a better mood than he’s been since this fucking vacation started.

“Here,” Kent says, and he nudges Shitty’s shoulder with the champagne bottle. Shitty fumbles for it. It’s going flat but he doesn’t mind.

“I’d say penny for your thoughts,” Shitty says, “but I’d need, like, a piggy bank. A whole hundred bucks in change. Guy can’t drink that many dime beers.”

“Every time you make college sound appealing you go and say something like that,” Kent says, and Shitty laughs with his eyes closed. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s like 2 a.m, man, and neither of us have pants on. This is practically sacred space.”

“I’m an idiot,” Kent says, and Shitty opens one eye.

“Nah.”

“No, I am. It’s-- um.”

“Me too, bro.”

“How’s Jack?” Kent asks, and Shitty does open his eyes, and Kent is staring out in the direction of the sky which is cloudy and reflecting light from the city so it still seems bright.

“Grumpy,” Shitty says. “Mostly. Wearing a lot of plaid. He got a haircut last week!”

"You're an asshole." 

"Yeah, sorry." Shitty feels bad. "It wasn't a great haircut, if that makes you feel better. He looks like a dad." 

“Is he happy?”

“Well—I mean I dunno and happiness as a concept is like, yknow, this weird capitalistic hell state where we’re expected to stay to be the most productive-- unless you mean about the haircut in which case I don't think he really noticed--“

“Oh my god shut up,” Kent says, and Shitty does. “I mean with his choice. You know, the Falconers.”

Shitty stares at the sky, washed out from light pollution, chews his lip. “Yeah,” he says. “Think so. I mean--” he’s tugging at the corner of his lip so he stops. “Yeah,” he says again. Jack is happy, he thinks, even though evaluating people as happy or not happy, especially someone like Jack, is kind of a waste of time. Jack’s been nervous, worried about making the right decision and well aware of the weight of his choices and how soon all of this will be over. But happy, too. It’s been a good spring. Complicated, stressful, a little weird. But good.

Kent sighs and Shitty can feel it in his gut. He sloshes the liquid around in the bottle for a minute. “Good,” he says quickly. He says it through his teeth but Shitty thinks he means it anyway. “I mean-- yeah.”

“I won’t spill if you wanna talk about it,” Shitty says automatically, because it’s what he does, what he likes to do.

“I thought you were getting a law degree man, not fucking psychoanalytics.”

“I am not gonna diagnose you with penis envy, don’t worry.”

“Vegas wasn’t even on his list, was it?” Kent says, all in a rush.

“I don’t know,” Shitty says slowly, and Kent snorts. “No no-- I mean it! It wasn’t on any list I saw but who’s privy to the inner workings of his mind other than the man himself, right? I’m positive the list he made public was vetted through several layers of Zimmermann neuroses, yknow what I mean?”

“He talked to you about it.”

“Well, yeah,” Shitty says. “He’s been bouncing ideas around for a while. Honestly it was kinda a team effort towards the end there. Rans made a lot of spreadsheets.”

“Huh,” Kent says distantly, staring at his hands.

“And I didn’t--” Shitty pauses for a second, grabs at the bottle and swigs some of the liquid then passes it back which gives him enough impetus to continue. “Didn’t realize he’d met with anyone from the Aces.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, and the expression on his face doesn’t change but something in his voice sounds strangled. “That’s because he didn’t. Unless I count.”

“Ah,” Shitty says, which is a colossally stupid thing to say.

“It was stupid,” Kent says, still staring at his hands. He’s drumming his fingers, tidy square nails and heavy calluses, on the side of the bottle. Shitty doesn’t say anything. “At that fucking party-- you know. I just-- I had to try, you know? It’s what we always said we wanted. Or at least what I thought, anyway. It was stupid.”

“Asking isn’t stupid.”

“Might’ve been alright if it had ended at that but, you know. He told me to fuck off, I got mad. Insulted his team. Your team. Some stuff that was even worse. Stupid, I told you. I was mean. On purpose. We’ve known each other for too long, if this even counts.”

“That explains a lot,” Shitty says, because it does, and he’s drunk but he’s also trying to be honest. “He was--” he searches for the right word for a second, “morose. After the kegster. Like, more than usual.”

“He didn’t tell you?” Kent glances over at him, flicks his hair out of his face as he does.

“No,” Shitty says. “Sometimes it’s worth it to drag shit outta people and sometimes it’s better to let them get there, yknow? Maybe he will, who knows. Jack’s a weird egg. I used to be wicked annoying about it, but he used to be wicked annoying about being friendly. Some kinda cyclical personality balance bullshit, I’m sure.”

“I can fucking imagine,” Kent says. “It’s funny. Did he ever-- nah. Nevermind.”

“What?” Shitty pulls himself upright a little more so his shoulders are out of the water and braces his arms on the sides of the hot tub. He’s starting to feel a little too warm, itchy all over from the chlorine in the water.

“Nothing.”

“Parson,” Shitty says, and he braces the nail of his middle finger against his thumb to flick water in Kent’s direction. “What the fuck could you say that could make this any more fucking weird?”

“You mean the fact that I’m sitting in the jacuzzi at one in the morning talking about my old best friend with his new best friend who I fucked?”

“Nail on the head, man.”

“Is your name Bartholomew? Cause that’s the only way this could be any weirder.”

“Believe it or not that’s a lot closer than Brad,” Shitty says seriously, and Kent just rolls his eyes and kicks at the jacuzzi jets with his foot. Shitty lets himself slide back into the jacuzzi because his back is getting cold and it’s movement to break the silence that’s building.

“I was gonna ask if he ever talked to you about the draft,” Kent says a minute later, long enough that Shitty had almost assumed he’d dropped it.

“No,” Shitty says. “But he has talked about what happened after.”

Kent turns his head all the way to stare at Shitty when he says that, eyebrows drawing down, and stays there long enough that Shitty knows it’s not him he’s really looking at.

“I’m just trying--” Kent starts eventually, then stops, then licks his lips. When he speaks again his voice sounds tired. “I’m trying to put that-- what you just said, the person you’re talking about-- and the seventeen-year-old kid I knew together, and I’m kinda coming up short.”

They stare at each other for a minute. “That’s a bad thing?” Shitty asks, and Kent sighs, pushes his hair out of his face.

“It’s who I knew.” Kent’s jaw is tight and his shoulders are sloping down and in towards each other, defensive. Shitty’s starting to feel like he’s gone about this the wrong way, haphazardly and drunkenly crashing through the edges of a conversation that Kent’s probably been having with himself for years.

“You wanna know what I got up to when I was seventeen?” He says quickly, and Kent looks back up at him. “I was dating this girl, right,” Shitty doesn’t give him time to protest. “My senior year of high school. Thought I was mad in love with her at the time-- it’s a little questionable now but at the time, man, swear to fuck that’s what I thought. Loaded parents, great sense of humor. Looked real ace in our fucking school uniform, the whole thing.”

“Okay,” Kent says skeptically.

“I dumped her,” Shitty says. “With zero warning.”

“Why?”

“Cause she got into Harvard,” Shitty says bluntly, and Kent is so surprised that he laughs out loud. “And for a lot of other reasons once I started thinking about it. My dad loved her, that didn’t help. And she was real tightly wound so it would’ve fallen apart anyway. Wanna know what else?”

“Okay, sure,” Kent says, waving his hand a little like he’s trying to laugh this off.

“Wore a school uniform. It was kinda saucy. Picture it. Guess what else.”

“Okay,” Kent says again, and Shitty grins.

“Got detention for trying to hotbox the van that we drove to all our away games in. I’m fucking lucky I didn’t get arrested. Guess what else.” Kent’s starting to grin and Shitty keeps going without waiting for him to say anything. “Picked a lot of fights with my mom over shit like the shoes she’d buy me, just to make her mad. Ruined the locks on our front door trying to pick them. Vommed all over the dean of students at Andover because I was drunk at 8am. Sold my grandparents’ expensive French cutlery on eBay. Shoplifted shit from Target despite the fact that I’ve got, yknow, a trust fund. I really wanted to get busted honestly-- wanted to see what my dad’d do if his kid’s sticky fingers got him plastered all over the 6 o’clock news. Never did though, too good at it.”

“Did your grandparents find out?”

“Oh yeah. They wanted to skin me. Think they would’ve if we’d been allowed in the same room together.“

“I put my foot through Bad Bob Zimmermann’s downstairs bathroom wall,” Kent says suddenly. “Because I was drunk and making out with his son in the shower.”

Shitty stares at him for a long second, and then he starts to laugh. The laugh pops out of him and it’s loud and probably really fucking rude but he can’t help it or do anything about it, and even as he claps his hands over his mouth he’s already laughing harder. To his surprise Kent snorts, and then bursts into laughter too, throwing his head back.

“No,” Shitty wheezes. “No way.” Kent nods helplessly, buries his face in his elbow to giggle into it. “What the fuck did you do?”

“We told him,” Kent says around his laughter, “that I slipped in the fucking shower! At two in the morning! I thought he was gonna murder me, I thought I’d be spending my entire life paying him back for the huge fucking hole in his wall. Turns out Bad Bob likes carpentry--”

Shitty’s laughing so hard there are spots in his eyes.

“-- and every time I see him I fucking apologize for it but I’ve never told him why he spent a month spackling--” The rest of his sentence is eaten up by his laughter and Shitty has to cover his face with his hands and breathe very deeply for several seconds to pull himself together. When he looks up again there’s more of a light in Kent’s eyes.

“The thing about being seventeen,” Shitty says, and Kent’s eyebrows go up, “is that you’re only seventeen as long as you’re seventeen.”

“Thrilling, thanks. Water is wet, time moves forward in a linear direction.”

“And every day takes us farther away from the last time we were seventeen, and thank fuck for that, man. Seriously. I think collectively most of us spend the next four or five years recovering from the trauma of being seventeen, putting our damn selves back together again. From the good shit and the bad shit, just the general experience of having to live through that year. You only have to do it once and it’s scarring for the rest of your fucking life. Nobody’s who they outta be when they’re a teenager, and if they were I don’t fucking trust ‘em.”

“You can say that again,” Kent says dryly.

“I can’t imagine--” Shitty’s on a roll and he’s rolling with it, “going through life without, fuck, being someone you’re not fucking happy with at least once. You know? Imagine if you had to stay seventeen forever.”

Kent’s face is sitting somewhere between irritating and amusement, which is usually the reaction people get when they’re exposed to a good old fashioned B. Shitty Knight Rant (patent pending), an activity advised to stave off existential crises or fights with your father.

“I’d pick seventeen over twenty,” Kent says. “Maybe not twenty one.”

“It had some highlights,” Shitty says. “I never got hungover.”

“Just wait until you hit your mid-twenties, oh my God.”

“Doesn’t mean I’d go back, though. I was a shithead. Everyone’s a shithead at seventeen.”

“Including Jack, you mean.”

“Jack’s still a shithead,” Shitty says, and Kent laughs again. “Different kinda shithead, I think, but nothing’s gonna cure that case of shitheadedness.”

“How the hell’d you even become friends?”

“I like a challenge,” Shitty says, and doesn’t elaborate. He’s getting better, as he’s getting older, at realizing when he’s being selfish and when well-meaning edges into self-centered. It is self-centered and frankly untrue to think that Jack’s replaced Kent with him or something, and it’s obvious to him that they still mean something to each other, though he’s beginning to understand how the differences there are a problem. But he does know that there are years of Jack’s life that Shitty’s been involved in, traveled through side by side with, that Kent doesn’t know about at all.

“I used to,” Kent says while Shitty’s thinking, and it seems like it’s more directed at himself than anything. “Wanna go back. To that summer. There’s a lot that--” he trails off.

“And now?”

“I don’t know,” Kent says. “But it was the best summer of my life. Til it wasn’t.”

“The thing about summers,” Shitty says, “is that there’s always another one. There’s one right around the corner, man.”

“Yeah,” Kent says, and he looks up and he doesn’t smile but he meets Shitty’s eyes, his own somewhere between grey and green. “What about spring breaks?”

“This is my last Samwell spring break,” Shitty says, “which is it’s own spring break experience.”

“And I’m guessing it hasn’t been the best.”

“Yknow,” Shitty says, “it’s taken a turn for the better in the last couple of hours.”

“You wanna keep that going, then?” Kent asks, and he moves across the jacuzzi seat so the water sloshes up onto Shitty’s arms. He stops when their knees bump into each other, leans an arm against the edge of the hot tub. His hair’s falling into his face again, curlier because of the humidity from the water, and Shitty reaches out to push it out of the way. Because he can.

“I could be convinced,” he says, and Kent's smile is very genuine.

 

-

 

Sometimes, a bad idea skips any kind of pretense and reveals itself to be a good one.  The true test of that is how you feel when you get up in the morning, which can be metaphorical or theoretical but in Shitty’s case today is very literal. 

There’s warm morning sunshine coming in through the half-open blinds and the other half of the bed is empty, though Shitty can hear the sound of movement in the kitchen. He hauls himself upright and takes inventory of the situation: his mouth tastes like a shoe, he’s got the beginnings of the kind of headache that’s going to stick around for the rest of the day at the very least, he feels dehydrated. His phone, sitting somehow miraculously on the bedside table to his left, is dead. None of his clothes are anywhere to be found. His hair is sticking up vertically, and smells like chlorine. He isn't filled with anything that resembles regret, really. He thinks he is, for half a second, but it's just the hangover. 

He's contemplating the hangover, and the concept of regret, and the six degrees of separation when the cat hops onto the bed which is when Shitty informs it that on no uncertain terms does he want it's opinion.

"Are you talking to my cat?" Kent's voice says from the kitchen.

"It's eyeing me," he says. "I don't think it likes me."

"She doesn't like anyone. Be nice to her anyway, bro, she's a lady."

"My apologies," Shitty tells the cat, who just gives him a look. 

“Here,” Kent says, coming back into the bedroom. He’s wearing athletic shorts and a backwards hat and no shirt and carrying two glasses of something that looks repulsive and almost chartreuse. Shitty accepts the glass, staring at it in horror.

“What the hell is that?” he says.

“Smoothie,” Kent shrugs. “Breakfast!” He looks just about as hungover as Shitty feels. Drinking a gigantic glass of something lumpy and green does not seem like it’ll fix the problem. 

“It’s—“ he struggles with words. “Colorful?” 

“It’s healthy, man! Got kale in it.” 

“Great big glass of Shrek cum, Parson.” 

Kent, halfway through drinking a mouthful of his homemade healthfood monstrosity, coughs and spits it back into the glass with a grimace. He stares at it for a minute, then sighs and sets it down on the bedside table. 

“Thank you,” he says, “for ruining my life.”

“You’re ruining your own life. When I’m this hungover the only option is the world’s biggest and greasiest breakfast. Or, yknow, get drunk again.” 

“That’s great for those of us on vacation,” Kent says dryly, “but for those of us who have to live their lives today--”

“Oh my god do you have to go play hockey?” 

“I’m probably gonna puke, and Goldie’s gonna chirp me, and then I’m gonna quit and move to the moon.” 

“The moon could be legit, though. Low gravity. No property tax. You wouldn't have to work to be the best hockey player up there, you'd just have to stand there. Sorry, though. Yknow."   
  
“It's as much my fault as it is yours," Kent sits down on the edge of the bed. "So listen, uh, can we agree--"

"To never, ever, ever in a thousand years under pain of death or, like, that dismemberment thing those crazy post-Reformation Anabaptists in Munich were put through with the hot pokers, yknow, the ones with the communism and the polygamy and the voice of God--" 

"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about--"

"-- tell Jack about this." 

"Yeah." 

They shake on it. "Hot pokers?" Kent asks. 

"I listened to a podcast about it." 

"I found your pants," Kent says. 

"Right," Shitty says. "Pants. Movement. Okay. If I die in your shower will you mail my body back to New England?" 

"I'll think about it," Kent says, and Shitty rolls out of bed and hobbles pathetically in the direction of the bathroom. 

 

-

 

Tequila. That's something to regret. Shitty ruminates on tequila, and on hot water, and the Anabaptists in Munich, and six degrees of separation. He doesn't die. In fact, he feels a little bit better. 

"I feel like I need to tell you," Kent says, as Shitty comes into the kitchen, pulling his shirt over his head, "that I'm actually an alright cook. It's not all ogre snot. I do a pretty good breakfast when I want to." He's shoving his feet into his sneakers, and Shitty follows suit because he does, he supposes, have to get back to his family, who all probably think that he's dead or he's run off to Arizona or something. 

 "You can prove that another time," Shitty says as he wrestles with his shoelaces. "If you're ever in Boston I'll show you around."

"I've been to Boston before. Like, a lot. Unless it's a euphemism."

"Maybe," Shitty says, and waggles his eyebrows. "And you may have been there but you're not from there."

"Yeah, yeah," Kent waves him off. "Hurry you would you, I'm gonna be late." 

"Aye aye, Captain," Shitty manages to unfuck the knot in his shoelace and stands up. "Hey Parson." 

"What?" Kent pauses two seconds away from opening his front door, turns some so he's looking back at Shitty. 

"You're alright," Shitty says, and Kent opens his mouth and then closes it again. "Kind of a dweeb, but, yknow, a legit guy."

Kent stares at him for another moment, his face unreadable. Then he shakes his head, smiles. "You should ask that girl out," he says. "Bryan? Bertrand. No? But that's close, I can tell." 

"You're not gonna get it," Shitty says, and as he's watching Kent frown at him the impulse strikes him to do something, so he does it. He reaches forward a little and he presses his mouth to Kent's mouth, mostly at the corner, quick and definitive. He hadn't been planning to do it but when he does he knows it's the right thing to do. When he pulls back, Kent is staring at him with a strange expression on his face.

"Bernard?" Kent says. 

"Fuck you," Shitty snaps, and Kent grins. 

 

-

 

"We're going to be late for lunch," is what Shitty's father says when Shitty gets back to the hotel. He seems to have barely noticed Shitty was gone. He seems to have barely left his room. 

"Don't think lunch is in the cards for me," Shitty says, because the thought of eating anything other than an entire loaf of bread is pretty horrifying at the moment. His dad just sighs. Gloria, of course, accosts Shitty as he's trying to get back to his hotel room.

"Where the hell did you go last night?" She stops him in the hallway, arms crosses and face puffy and bleary-eyed. "I had to call a cab by myself to get back here. By myself! And who was that guy you were with? I didn't know you had any friends in Vegas." 

"Turns out I do," Shitty says, and he goes to take a nap. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from, somewhat predictably, 'up the wolves' by the mountain goats because one time jd said this about this song & i've been thinking about it: "I think it's a song about the moment in your quest for revenge when you learn to embrace the futility of it. The moment when you know that the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you're headed is not the direction in which you want to go, yet you're going to head that way a while longer anyway cause that's just the kind of person you are."
> 
> kent 'parties when the wolf comes home' parson. kent 'i love these torture devices from my old best friend' parson. shitty 'do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive' knight. 
> 
> somewhere like 2 or 3 years down the line when they're all pals bitty will go 'never have i ever had sex with shitty knight' as a joke to tease jack/lardo/whoever else & kp will drink & jack zimmermann will have to go sit on the bathroom floor because he's laughing too loud & ruining the party
> 
> THANKS FOR READING THIS RIDIC FIC say hi on tumblr or twit if u liked it :))))


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